Labor faces a moment of truth

“Whatever happened to the vague sense 10 years ago of the need to develop a community unionism?” asked another official, who suggested labor leaders on the ground in Wisconsin shouldn’t have been surprised by the Walker attack, yet were clearly caught off guard. “They’ve been talking only to themselves for too long.”

Many strategists and even some labor officials argue that the genuine passion and emotion being felt and displayed on the ground in Wisconsin is obscuring a central problem: Unions still haven’t figured out even a semblance of an effective PR strategy.

That includes, in many places, not taking steps that could help them, such as trying “to dress up something that looks like a sacrifice and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing,’” another labor leader lamented.

To be sure, as many labor officials quickly point out, the fight in Wisconsin and in a handful of other states is on a scale that requires a new strategic playbook — it goes much further than fights over pensions and benefits, which have been the hallmark of most union-versus-government battles in states like New Jersey, California, Indiana and Minnesota.

“Labor could not have walked away from this,” said Norman Adler, a longtime lobbyist for public sector labor unions in New York. “Whether there are risks or not … if they lose, they just have to reconfigure their tactics and move on.”

He added, “Whatever happens in Wisconsin, this is going to be replicated elsewhere. The unions can’t back off of this — it would be like hiking up a white flag. And that’s why a lot of private-sector labor [is backing the efforts]. Nobody can risk losing true collective bargaining.”

“You’ve got to put your stake in the ground somewhere, and the governor there was so outrageous about ending collective bargaining,” Sunshine said. “For labor’s future, they have to pick a good fight, and this one has obviously become it.”

But this fight isn’t at the time or place of the unions’ choosing. Hostility to public-sector workers, including teachers, is at an all-time high amid a recession and a new national mania for curbing the tide of fiscal red ink. Walker appears to have a firm legislative majority on his side.

And labor is struggling to explain — and convince a voting public that has inched away from the concept of unions as a bedrock American institution over the years — that while it’s willing to be flexible on Walker’s demands for cost control, his attempts to change the rules governing public unions are a matter of institutional life and death and union principle. Labor hopes the public will see Walker’s attempt to use a budget gap to reshape labor-management relations as an overreach. But for many people watching from afar, the details of what Walker wants to accomplish have gotten lost, and the fight is playing out as yet another in a long string of recent state-based brawls over the high cost of the public sector.